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2024-09-15 22:32

Tommy

Registered: Sep 2024
Posts: 11

Amiga musician thinking about composing on C64

Hi there!

Back in the 90's I was active as a composer in the Amiga demo scene and mostly made chip music (I also made the music for a few PC productions in the 90's and early 00's). I primarily used ProTracker and AHX.
I've decided to (finally) try to make some music on the Commodore 64. I've played around a little bit (with a huge emphasis on little) with Goat Tracker many years ago but never finished or released anything.

If you would start out brand spanking new right now and would pick an editor, which one would you choose?
It seems to me like the two most obvious choices are either
1) Goat Tracker / GTUltra, or
2) SID Factory II.
What are the pros and cons with either choice?
Would you pick something else? If yes, what and why?
It's probably not a bad idea to learn multiple editors, but I'd rather focus on one while I learn to crawl.

When you save the songs as Commodore 64 machine code is it worth the effort optimizing the patterns in the editor yourself beforehand, or do the editors generally do a good job of optimizing the patterns for you (cut out empty sections etc)?

If you pick Goat Tracker, are there any benefits using GTUltra instead? Is GTUltra purely a different UI, or are there any other differences? Are the songs you make in GTUltra fully compatible with Goat Tracker?

In Goat Tracker I've noticed that there's quite some delay between hitting a key and an instrument playing (seems to be true in the other editors as well). Even if I'm running the program with the /B1 argument there's a very noticeable delay. Do you have any tricks on how to minimize the delay so that jam mode actually becomes usable?

Do you have any technical tips or tricks worth sharing when it comes to for example dealing with the ADSR bug? I'd like to minimize the duration of any silence on each channel before triggering a new note. I'm sure this is very dependent on how the ADSR envelope is set up on an instrument, but any help would be appreciated.

I know that I'm asking a lot of questions, but any help would be greatly appreciated before I jump into the rabbit hole.

Best regards, Tommy.

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2024-09-26 00:23

Tommy

Registered: Sep 2024
Posts: 11

Quoting vincenzo

Couple of years ago I tested and made music with 12 different music editors.

12? That's ambitious. :) I'm not gonna be quite that ambitious.

Quoting vincenzo

Once I tried SF2, I felt I'm at home and it immediately clicked with me. This means, to my workflow and brain-capacity SF2 is the closest and best thing. Which, in your case might be different.

I'll agree that the workflow seems nice in SF2 (at least when it comes to the pattern order list and the "sequences stacked on top of each other" as JCH expressed it).

Quoting vincenzo

I'd suggest you to give GT2, SF2, CC and SID-Wizard a testrun, and not only a testrun but use them for a couple of weeks. Then you'll have a feel for one of them, that's gonna be your tool for C64 music. See, if you settle for one that is not right but people said it's the best... well, then you will feel frustration every time you start making music.

Yes, of course you've got to feel comfortable with the instrument. I'll probably start out with GT2 and SF2 and see which one has the most comfortable work flow.

Quoting vincenzo

All of the above mentioned editors have great documentation (also, a SF2 tutorial from me is long due and it's also WIP). If you have any question, we surely can find you the best person to help let it be about GT2, SF2 or any of the music tools.

Thanks for the help, it's appreciated.

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